An AppleCare support rep talks: Mac malware is "getting worse"

[Jack]

ZDNet writer Ed Bott has today published a fascinating conversation with an AppleCare support rep on the subject of Mac malware.

For reasons which will become obvious when you read the interview, the Apple support rep has chosen to remain anonymous. Chances are that if he hadn't kept his identity secret that he would be thrown out of the company pretty quickly.

According to Bott's source at Apple, AppleCare's call volume is "4-5 times higher than normal" and the overwhelming majority of calls come from Apple customers who have been hit by the current spate of fake anti-virus attacks on the Mac OS X platform.

The Mac Defender fake anti-virus attack, and its variously named variants, are becoming common problems it seems:

It started with one call a day two weeks ago, now it’s every other call. It’s getting worse. And quick.

Perhaps most astonishingly, the interview reveals that Apple's official policy is that representatives are "not supposed to help customers remove malware from their computer."

The reason for the rule, they say, is that even though Mac Defender is easy to remove, we can't set the expectation to customers that we will be able to remove all malware in the future. That's what antivirus is for.

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Read the full interview.

 

[Shadow Death]

Ironic that all of this started after the Mac vs PC commercials.

 

[jamescv7]

Well Mac Malware are really advance just to infect Mac OS X systems, they made successfully in Windows so that their steeping stone.

 

[McLovin]

Well I think that people with Macs can't always hide. People will soon buy Macs and realise that viruses do come on Macs.